AI Ethics & Regulatory Compliance

An internationally recognized thought leader in data science and AI ethics, Bill Franks is President of Analytics Advisory Partners. His prior roles include Chief Analytics Officer at Teradata (NYSE: TDC) and the International Institute For Analytics, and Director of the Center for Data Science and Analytics at Kennesaw State University. He currently serves on the advisory boards of ActiveGraf, DataSeers, Kavi Global, and Quaeris.

His speaking career spans the globe: he has keynoted the 8th China Cloud Computing Conference in Beijing, the Association of Bank Marketing Conference in Buenos Aires, and delivered private keynotes for Disney, Walmart, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Marriott, and Procter & Gamble, among many others. He has also spoken at INFORMS Business Analytics, the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, Forbes Digital Summit, and the Chief Analytics Officer Forum.

Franks is the author of four books including 97 Things About Ethics Everyone In Data Science Should Know, and his Analytics Matters blog has run monthly since 2011, with coverage in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and VentureBeat. He is an inaugural inductee into the Analytics Hall of Fame (2019) and has been ranked a top 10 global big data influencer and top global AI influencer on multiple international lists.

Tom Phelan is a Consultant and Strategist helping enterprises worldwide navigate the ethical and legal use of generative AI. He retired from Hewlett Packard Enterprise in May 2025 as a Fellow and VP in the Hybrid Cloud Chief Technologist Office, where he led a global engineering organization — spanning teams across the Americas, Europe, and Asia — at the frontier of AI, sustainability, and edge computing.

Tom co-founded BlueData in 2012 — raising $39M from Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital — and served as its Chief Architect, building the EPIC platform that automated AI/ML and Big Data workloads across hybrid-cloud environments at enterprises worldwide. When HPE acquired BlueData in 2018, EPIC became the foundation for the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, now deployed globally. He has spoken at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and been featured in SiliconANGLE, The Register, and O’Reilly publications.

Before BlueData, Tom spent a decade at VMware as a senior staff engineer, designing the Pluggable Storage Architecture for the ESX platform. Earlier still, he was a Principal Engineer at SGI and a core member of the team that built XFS — the first commercially available 64-bit file system. He holds a BA in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and is the holder of numerous patents in storage and virtualization.